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The business of managing carbon — from carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects in the oil and gas sector to taking carbon dioxide out of the air — is an emerging field that's opening up job opportunities for engineers.

"It's congruent with a lot of other things that are happening in the oil industry," says Rob Lavoie, a reservoir engineering specialist with RPS Energy, who at one time operated a company that focused on CCS.

The public, regulators, governments and environmental groups are putting a lot more scrutiny on the carbon footprint associated with the oil and gas industry, which is causing more energy to be focused on developing CCS and related technologies in an effort to reduce carbon emissions.

CCS involves capturing carbon that's used or produced in the operation of oil and gas projects, electricity generation and other industrial applications. It has given rise to a new breed of engineers and other professionals who are breaking new ground by testing the concept of capturing and storing carbon dioxide underground.

"There's a whole service industry sprouting up around CCS that deals with monitoring gas compositions of wells, looking for potential leakage (and) seismic projects that are used to do time-lapsed seismology," Lavoie says.

It's a growing field that requires a specialized, tailored skill set using a wide spectrum of traditional engineers, including chemical, process, metallurgy, civil and mechanical engineers. It includes the full spectrum of energy professionals from geologists, geophysicists, petrophysicists, seismic experts, oilfield service companies, reservoir, and production and drilling engineers, among others.

At the recent American Association for the advancement of Science convention in Vancouver, CCS specialists told the crowd the technology could cut global carbon dioxide emissions by 25 per cent in the next 100 years.

The International Energy Agency has identified CCS as a crucial way of balancing the world's reliance on fossil fuels. As stricter rules come into force requiring new coal-fired electrical generation plants to produce less carbon dioxide, some provinces — including British Columbia — have moved to ban coal-fired generation that does not include CCS technology, further increasing the demand for carbon management professionals.

In Alberta, the province is spending about $2 billion on four pilot projects to eliminate five megatonnes of carbon dioxide, with a goal for them to evenutally eliminate 120 megatonnes a year between now and 2050.

Lavoie says the projects are demonstrating the effectiveness of CCS technology, but adds it will likely take until 2020 before it can be rolled out on an industry-wide basis.

"If we don't get started until 2020, we'll have 30 years left to put 115 or 120 megatonnes a year of projects into the ground," Lavoie says.

Meanwhile, researchers at universities across Canada are pioneering ways to capture carbon dioxide sequester it in vast underground chambers and monitor those sites to ensure safety and reliability of the technology.

One such researcher is Chris Hawkes, a geological engineer, who is testing powerful new computer simulations to figure out how to inject dioxide deep underground and ensure it stays there — a potentially game-changing concept to radically reduce carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry.

He is funding his work with a grant from Carbon Management Canada (CMC), a network for centres of excellence. "This unconventional approach brings together state-of-the-art tools and methods from geomechanics and reservoir engineering and is expected to yield better, more powerful computer simulations," Hawkes says.

Another is Peter Wild, director of the Institute for Integrated Energy Systems at the University of Victoria, who is collaborating with experts in a wide range of engineering disciplines in a lab-to-field project that is the first fibre-optic system designed to monitor dioxide at underground storage sites.

The professor of mechanical engineering is working with an environmental scientist, a geoscientist, a micro-manufacturer and a microfluidics expert, along with several graduate students.

"It's a diverse group and to tackle these kinds of problems, you need to have a breadth of expertise to call upon," Wild says. "I think our graduates are going to be highly employable."

While there is a global race to develop CCS technology, how quickly it turns into a mainstream career field depends on how much and how fast companies and governments invest in the technology.

"As far as carbon sequestration, there's a huge market out there," Wild says, adding regulatory framework, tax incentives to develop CCS, public pressure to reduce carbon emissions and companies' willingness to invest in it are all critical factors.

Encana Corp. has already invested heavily in its Weyburn carbon storage project, which has been underway in Saskatchewan since 2000. Other companies are hopping on board as they begin to see the writing on the wall.

Enhanced oil recovery also aims to reduce carbon emissions by using solvents to get more oil out of each well that's drilled, while other projects involve taking carbon dioxide directly out of the air or at the source of emissions, such as industrial smokestacks.

The bottom line is in this new, emerging area where engineers can apply their skills, graduates and professionals who specialize in it will be a hot commodity in the future, Wild contends. "Without exception, (graduates) all go on to find interesting, challenging work," he says. "The skills that they've gained get them in the door. There is huge value in the training that these people get."

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